Mint green, as it turns out, doesn’t always leave the best taste in one’s mouth. 21l6k
Especially if you’re Brady Sharp, the Arkansas-based founder of social sports betting site BroThrow, who got a text late last week from a pal.
“It’s funny, one of my friends, an original BroThrow , sent me a pic of ESPN BET’s logo,” Sharp told Sports Handle. “And he said, ‘Man, this looks a lot like your logo,’ and I started looking at it side by side and, yeah, there’s a lot of similarity here.”
Yes, the ESPN BET logo — the big ‘B’, the mint green color scheme — is definitely similar to the BroThrow logo, which debuted nearly four years ago.
So Sharp took this intel to LinkedIn, where he noted the similarity between the logos. For some reason, LinkedIn took the post down (Sharp is trying to find out why) but not before it “started to get a lot of steam,” as Sharp noted. He also posted about it on Twitter/X:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Nice design @espn. https://t.co/bCVzqxtKIx
— BroThrow (@brothrowbets) October 18, 2023
He first spoke to the Earnings + More Substack, which was noted in Steve Ruddock’s Straight to the Point Substack. And now Sharp is trying to find someone, anyone, at PENN Entertainment or ESPN BET to discuss next steps.
“It’s one thing if you’re a mom-and-pop hardware store in Iowa and your logo gets impersonated by a sports betting company,” Sharp said. “It’s another thing to be in the sports betting business and see it used by another sports betting company, especially one as big as ESPN. It’s a little shocking, for sure.”
‘Meeting of the minds’ 1d1th
Sharp said his goal is to sit down with representatives of ESPN BET and PENN and have a “meeting of the minds” about what to do with the logo situation.
“We’re a startup,” Sharp noted, indicating a long, expensive legal battle is not his first choice. “But we filed for trademarks, we’ve been in business for 3½ years, and so we reached out to our attorney and tried to figure out what our options are, what our strategy is.
“And the strategy we aligned on is to just try and get a meeting first. There’s a clear similarity between the logos, and I’d like to see what we can do to make this right before we go down the path of cease-and-desist letters.”
Emails from Sports Handle to both ESPN and PENN were unreturned as of publication time.
Meet, greet, bet 3f372v
As for Sharp’s business, BroThrow is a social sports betting app that allows s to post and/or accept vig-free wagers. It’s currently an invitation-only site, and Sharp said the community — along with KYC protocols and a subscription-based service — allow s the peace of mind to know their wagers will get settled up. There are five different ways to pay, including PayPal and Venmo.
Sharp said of the $5.2 million in settled wagers in September, only $56 went unpaid.
That $56 represented Sharp’s biggest problem a few days ago. Not anymore.
“We’re at all the industry shows,” Sharp noted. “We’re at G2E, we’re at SBC, at iGaming NEXT. We’ve pitched in competition before. We wear our logos, they’re plainly visible.
“I don’t think it was malicious that they came out with a logo that looks remarkably similar to ours, but I do think there’s been plenty of opportunity for someone at ESPN or PENN to have seen our logo somewhere. Maybe they outsourced it, who knows, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they’ve seen it someplace before. I just find it hard to believe they haven’t run across it.”
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